Human breast milk collection, when not fed directly to an infant, is generally expressed into a collection container, such as a bottle or bag. The expression and collection of the breast milk is usually accomplished with the aid of a breastpump. Breast milk is important to the nutritional needs of an infant and requires significant effort on the part of the mother to collect, store, protect, and ultimately feed the milk to the infant.
Mothers have a desire to monitor their milk production to understand how they are performing. Monitoring milk production helps mothers gauge how much milk they have, how effectively they are collecting and expressing milk, and may provide clinical data to a physician for troubleshooting. This type of information is most often manually recorded in a pumping log, which may be in the form of a journal or electronic software in which a mother may enter information regarding her pumping session, including how much milk was collected, the date/time of the collection, which breast(s) the milk was collected from, etc. A manual pumping log is a tedious process as it requires the mother to keep track of her pumping session and write down information. To effectively analyze her performance from the log, the mother would need to enter this data into a computer to evaluate trends and anomalies.
It is desirable, therefore, to provide a system to the mother that can easily and accurately capture and manage milk collection information, that minimizes the effort involved, and that works seamlessly with her lifestyle. With the advances in portable computing power, as demonstrated in the increasing capabilities of smart phones, data can be collected and utilized in situ. A milk collection device that enables automatic data collection through interaction with a computer, such as a smart phone, would be beneficial to mothers.